Since 1998 Rob Pruitt (1964, Washington DC) has been making deliberately repetitive use of the panda motif. Initially intended as a form of humour, this refrain is both a response to a host of emotions, sensibilities and causes and a publicising of an endangered species the artist first encountered in a personal political context: in 1972 the Chinese government gave two pandas to the Nixon White House in Pruitt’s home town, an event that contributed to the future artist’s innate fascination with the animal. Next year we will be celebrating the series’ first twenty years; and as long as there are pandas Rob Pruittwill paint them!

These days his panda comes camouflaged as «motivational posters» – or, for the purposes of the exhibition, under the heading «motivational pandas». Here our animal is associated with coaching and personal growth messages supposed to unleash motivation and even boost our self-knowledge. Their sources notably include the philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (author of the celebrated Walden; or, Life in the Woods); fashion personalities like Coco Chanel, who provides the title of the exhibition with the statement “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve“; and such emblematic pop culture figures as Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi and his famous “May the Force Be With you“.

All these «mantras» of encouragement have left behind the models pinned up on the walls of America’s offices, schools and hospitals and joined the ones here at Air de Paris. And this time the panda will even be there on the same footing as the viewer: a giant version seemingly locked into contemplation of a sunset or colours shading off into each other.“You Get The Face You Deserve“: the title of this fourth solo show comes from these “motivational pandas“, but it also chimes with the Artificial Intelligence Style Transfer Self-Portraits, a new series created with software whose smart algorithm takes the contours of the artist’s face and mixes them into the features of art history masters and icons. And so we see Pruitt daring a joyous face-to-face with David Hockney’s blue swimming pool, Bridget Riley’s signature stripes and the Fauvist curves of Henri Matisse.

In the light of a second reading of the exhibition title, the Polar Bears also seem to take on quite different meaning. The big white bear is an endangered species, too, and its presence here alongside statements from political or politically connoted figures – among them Barack Obama, Brian Eno, Desmond Tutu, Jane Goodall and Ansel Adams – comes as an manifesto reminding us of their ecological awareness their commitment in the urgent struggle against global warming.

Rob Pruitt (1964, Washington DC) lives and works in New York. In 2018, the Kunsthalle Zurich will be presenting a monographic exhibition of his work curated by Daniel Baumann. At the invitation of Bjarne Melgaard he is currently showing solo at the Rod Bianco Gallery in Oslo. He has had numerous other individual exhibitions, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, the Aspen Art Museum and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. «Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market», one of his most iconic projects, has featured in many venues around the world, including Palm Springs Art Museum (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2015), AplusA Gallery, Venice (2015), the Paris Mint (2012) and Tate Modern (2009).

Galerie Alain Gutharc is delighted to present Les Courants Parallèles, Guillaume Linard-Osorio’s second solo show. The exhibition features an exclusive series of ten paintings, expression of the artist’s new plastic approach.

Guillaume Linard-Osorio’s practice is based on a deconstructionist poetics and a vision of the artwork which, instead of linearity, aims at a plastic form that captures change of state, transposition and process – a pivotal point of postmodern sensitivity fueled by an enthusiasm for discontinued mental landscapes more receptive to disruptions and the unexpected than order and unity. After studying architecture, Guillaume Linard-Osorio developed an interest for the form and function of raw medium, for process and the transformation of matter, from its most primal state to its narrative
possibilities. His deconstructive gesture and experiments led his practice toward a certain austerity, a set of forms freed from all functionality, waiting for possibilities.

For this corpus, Guillaume Linard-Osorio has worked with a new material: polycarbonate (his first time with synthetic material) he uses in a window-shaped format, the corner stone of all housing principles. Here, the artist engages in a research on the very essence of painting: the in and out of scope, the plasticity of canvas, gesture, duration etc. Maurice Denis defines painting as “essentially, a plane surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” Hung on the wall, the polycarbonate– a material characterized by its resistance and the isolation provided by its constitutive void- becomes the canvas. We leave ready-made material displayed on the ground for painting and its vibrations.

Inspired by children memories of the artist looking at his father working in the garden, the window represents the
“inside-outside” interface. The architecture therefore acquires a function: it becomes penetrable and the defining framework of the image. Used as a texture rather than a function, the polycarbonate cut to the format of a window here materializes the transition from idea to matter. The landscapes it frames are obtained by injection of colored resin. Their composition is shaped by drips and time. Made out of 4 to 6mm-wide layered assembled slabs, neither distinct nor blurry, they evoke painting as well as photographic frame and landscape along with the first “plein air” paintings on the eve of
Modernity. Windows are a recurring theme all throughout the history of painting. With Matisse and Bonnard, it became a metaphor of painting itself. As for Klein, he wanted to experiment void through jumping from a low wall, filling the artistic space with his body through the void. If an artwork is the transposition of a moment in time into a livable space, Guillaume Linard-Osorio’s paintings -made out of the cheapest material from construction sites- make breathing rhythm and its vital dimension visible and sensible. Artworks also open up new horizons, like those of a post-digital world (the
blues and greens of the artist’s landscapes being a reference to Microsoft layouts, from the raster to the diffraction of the digital image and its pixelization). This series therefore echoes op art and the responsive eye in that it brings about new perceptions modalities. Here, the use of color become tie and dye, dripping and stripe (recalling the work of Bridget Riley, Sol Lewitt and Kees Visser) creates a chromatic partition where shimmering colors and a stave-like reading system can dialog.

If painting is the place of encounter of the here and now, it also speaks about metamorphosis and the –lost- time
of an uncertain memory. Guillaume Linard-Osorio (literally) forges an iconography of resistance: in his work, color, shape and material are hold together, supported and emphasized by the void.

How are you feeling? What are you thinking about? Listening to? Writing? Reading? Who has come to visit? I know it’s absolute torture for you to be stuck in the house. Can you role play? Pretend that you are a fragile but glamorous agoraphobic? Wear lipstick with your best nightgowns and listen to Bach at the highest volume? Write your memoirs, write poetry! Spencerian sonnets and sestinas! Deep down I know none of that will really work. You have the worst FOMO of anyone I know.

I don’t write letters, I only write emails. But for you, anything. Please don’t judge my handwriting. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to face all of these decisions like whether my “y’s” and “g’s” should be straight or curved, so I’ve included both for good measure. That’s me… always splitting the difference. Half the people I know call me Julie and the other half call me Julia. Not knowing my own name causes acute existential doubt, but I just can’t seem to grab the bull by the horns and decide on one or the other. I’ve internalized the ambiguity.

Instead of writing I wish I could beam myself to you. Or better yet, that you could be here with me. I know you love Paris — your home away from home. It feels strange to be here without you. But Paris is different now. All of your friends are gone. Not on holiday, but gone for good. No longer in the world. We felt it coming, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

On my 30th birthday you told me that your 30’s were your favorite decade and I felt so buoyant, so hopeful to have the best years of my life ahead of me. Now I’m halfway through it and I think maybe I’m doing something wrong. But I am droopy, depressive, cloudy, crippled with self doubt. Why couldn’t I have inherited your relentless optimism? When you were in Paris as a young woman I remember you telling me how your friends would call you “la veuve joyeuse.” I want to rewind the movie of your life back to that time. I guess I started shooting too late. But I can picture you with short dresses and long red hair. (I also wished I had inherited your legs). And of course the requisite red nail polish. Or maybe you thought nail polish was vulgar at that point. I can’t think of a time when I’ve seen you without red nails. I’m convinced they grow in red at this point. But I think that only became an obsession after you saw Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which came out in 1988 when I was six years old.

I’ve clung on to everything you’ve told me about your time in Paris in the 50’s and 60’s. Didn’t you say that you and Jess were in the Jardin Luxembourg when Truffaut was shooting 400 Blows? I’ve never looked for you two in the film because I would be too disappointed to find out that you didn’t make it on screen. I know you’re there, and that’s all that matters.

La Nouvelle Vague, le Nouveau Roman. I remember you saying how much you loved Nathalie Sarraute. Maybe it’s because she was a Russian Jew like us. Was she the one who wrote about a doorknob for five pages? From what I’ve read of her work, I love it too. In the same way I love Clarice Lispector or Jane Bowles. They can express all of the contradictions, anxiety and humor of inner life with scientific exactitude. Do you think Nathalie Sarraute read Jane Bowles, for instance?

This is from Sarraute’s The Planetarium:
“Five rooms and she’s entirely alone. But that’s just it, that’s where her madness lies. I was about to tell you… That’s the funny part. She never has any company. But she must have two parlors, a big dining room, a guest room… That’s why she’s always getting things ready, so as to invite people. Everything must be perfect, spotless: it probably seems to her that their eye is there, always, ready to seize upon the slightest mistake, every imperfection, every error in taste… People’s opinions frighten her so… It’s never perfect enough. Never entirely ready… she doesn’t want it to be. In reality, she doesn’t care to see anybody: what she needs, in fact, is this getting ready. For her, that suffices.”

I have those same anxieties, yet I’m still a mess. You told Davide that you went to someone’s place (he remembered it as Susan Sontag, but I don’t think it was her) and it was cluttered with piles of crap everywhere. Whoever it was told you that cleaning was tedious and anti-intellectual. I can see you really embraced that sentiment. I should just give in and embrace it too. It would save me a lot of energy.

One’s living environment, home, furniture, books, objects, are all so revealing. “What sofa really represents me as a person?” is a question I have asked myself more than once. Hint: oftentimes it is not the most functional. I have at least two (no, definitely three) pieces of unusable furniture in my modestly sized apartment. Why, you may ask? I suppose I find something beautiful and tragic about furniture that can’t be used. I picture the impossible body it would accommodate, I picture the thing as a body, anthropomorphized like Pee-Wee Herman’s chair, maybe a little sadder, always a little sleepy.

Speaking of sleepy, I’m sleepy. It’s six hours ahead here so I tend to stay up later than I should to feel closer to New York. I’m picturing you right now in your plush armchair, long, thin, perfectly pedicured feet resting on the ottoman. Your legs mirroring the painting next to you on the wall of your legs from fifty years ago. One hand is holding a kindle and the other is fidgeting an oversized ring. This is you. Inextricably connected to your environment, at least in my memory.

Almine Rech is proud to present Of false beaches and butter money, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Canadian artist Chloe Wise.

Linked in approach, but not material, Wise’s practice spans installation, video, sculpture, painting, and drawing. Signaling the link between self-presentation and forms of betterment, Wise discloses relationships between image creation and authenticity, probing the performative means we use to adjust to the commercialization of all aspects of contemporary life. Here, food becomes the nexus for unexpected associations—a cypher for the artist to map protean relations between self-care, consumption, gender negotiations, and alternative routes to pleasures.

For her debut presentation in Paris, the artist lyrically explores the dissonance between visual cultures and the systems, products, and persons they aim to represent. This deliberate and loosely defined mandate sees the artist mining the iconography of milk, from maids to anthropomorphized and feminized cows to the abjection of the maternal body, carrying these symbolic propositions into unexpected territory. Here, the agreed upon translation of the unhealthy and unnecessary production of dairy is contrasted with the romantic and pastoral ideals through which they are disseminated. This particular discord becomes emblematic of truth’s precarity in sites wherein one element is meant to stand in for entire systems.

Female sitters in Wise’s delicately composed portraits stand amongst goods of this industry, conjuring the elite portraiture of a bygone era while negating the fixity of status that these images once affirmed. Instability is signaled through odd pairings of props, such as Evian water bottled filled with almond milk, as well as the engorged size of each sitter, looming over the viewer from a stratospheric vantage, reveling in her command of our attention and dissidence in conforming to any one frequency of time, place, or standard of beauty.

Wise returns to the genre of still life through a similarly canted lens. A mirror table refracts a lush and sensuous composition of fruit, oysters, and cheese, linked together by a milky stream that runs across and seeps onto this feast. Here, the crystallization of a singular moment of bounty and wealth that the genre once propagated is undercut by the tension of time activated by the mirrored surface of the sculpture’s support, changing and moving according the subject’s vantage. With temporality rearing its head, the jewel-like offering becomes precarious, flirting with its inevitable souring and decomposing, allowing us to imagine the forming of an abject skin on the sculpture’s milky trail, a malodor rising within the room, a fruit turned to sludge, covered in a fuzzy self-defensive blanket.

A new a single-channel video work, featuring an original musical score by Wise and collaborators, follows this decentered impulse to depart from narrative, refusing to cohere in the neatness of metaphor. The video sees friends of the artist perform a desynchronized dance number in a public forum, wherein personal associations pair with an unbinding reality. The technical abilities of the dancers, who jaunt in lush green landscape, mix with relaxing beginner yoga poses found on YouTube tutorials. An original score and poetry by Wise, made-up of tweet-like snippets culled in social settings, point to the symbiotic and disjointed experience of living a media-heavy existence. Systems of reference congeal over the messiness of contemporary experience; this friction comes to the stand in for the ways we navigate the trickery and pleasure we take in consumption.

Altérables is a project that consists of forming a series of images in the same process: images recovered from the printed press are photocopied and then retouched using one or more layers of transparent tracing paper, on each layer a drawing comes Duplicate, move or add an element, contour, etc. Present in the original image. The image thus modified is then scanned and put into another context and another medium undergoing the alterations due to the different transformation steps.

Since the creation of the Movement of New Realism in 1960, to which Daniel Spoerri belonged, this artist
embodies a major figure of modern and contemporary art.

The son of Dada and Duchamps, Daniel Spoerri likes to unbalance order, the hierarchy of values, beliefs, and preconceived ideas. Art and life mingle, the world is potentially a work of art, everyday objects, those found, hackneyed phrases are as many ready-mades full of meaning, affect and aesthetic. Everything is fetish. Everything is ritual. Everything is art. You only have to present, to “trap” the thing, as such. What is trivial, unworthy, vulgar,
trash, rubbish, doomed to death is put back, by chance, and mainly thanks to Spoerri’s will, into life cycle through art.

Daniel Spoerri, who is fully part of this movement, which claimed a “collective singularity”, published, in 1962, his first book, today a cult book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (re-edited this year by Nouvel Attila editions). In this work already, his friends Dieter Roth, Robert Filliou and Roland Topor intervened.

These exchanges with artists are a central feature of his work. This essential aspect will be seen thanks to the re-edition of a set of 22 postcards entitled monsters are inoffensive, first edited by Fluxus in 1967. In them, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou and Roland Topor take photographs, draw, and assemble.

40 years after “Crocodrome”, the inaugural exhibition of Centre Pompidou in 1977, in which Tinguely invited Daniel Spoerri to exhibit, for the first time, Le Musée Sentimental and La Boutique Aberrante, the visitor will be able to discover works done in the last thirty years, still never shown in France.

40 years later, this exhibition will be a unique opportunity to show Daniel Spoerri’s most important contribution, which has influenced artistic trends such as Pop Art, Fluxus, Neo Dada… and prove it is still at work today.

For his second exhibition at Art : Concept gallery, Peter Regli who is best known for his ongoing project Reality Hacking – a series of temporary and often anonymous interventions in public spaces – blurs our screens again. No more marble snowmen, laughing buddhas and bouquets of phalluses. The joyful pop sculptures have given way to the abstract brutality of the stone and Indian ink. The tone has also become darker. A scent of past or petrified life floats: trapped by metal the stones will no longer welcome festivities around the fire, locked in their bamboo cages they will be nothing more than simulacra of birds.

The use of stone, however, is less surprising. If one retraces the practice of Peter Regli, stone is omnipresent, in an often mischievous and teasing way. It serves as crutch to a Mexican bench (RH No. 330, 2015), plays the role of a fake meteorite in the Swiss Alps (RH No. 30-24 Faked Meteorites, 1996) and secretly enters the Celtic site of Vaison la Romaine (RH No. 194, 2002). Both outdoors and in the exhibition space, Regli plays with our representations, our expectations and our ability to look for the familiar within the most abstract. Extracted from their natural environment – Chile, Chine, Canada or other distant countries - and reintegrated in a context entirely foreign to them, these stones, ultimate symbols of that is inert and immutable, become bearers of new and paradoxical meanings. Placed up in cages, they are mistaken for birds. Arranged in a circle on the ground, they evoke a mysterious rite or a prehistoric gathering. Nothing in their objective form or color, however, seemed to predetermine such interpretations.

Beyond the identified phenomenon of pareidolia – which is applicable to any natural or manufactured element – Regli is primarily concerned with this (if not magical, at least unexplained) attraction exerted by stones on human beings. In spite of their apparent inertia and abstract coldness, we maintain an affective relationship with them; which pushes us to collect them, to stack them to mark our passage or keep them preciously. Here, they all look alike, especially in their “made in China” cages. Yet they display an infinite singularity, resisting as best they can to chain production and globalization.

Translation Frieda Schumann

Biography
Born in 1959 in Andermatt (Switzerland), Peter Regli lives and works in New York. Spanning four continents, his Reality Hacking project consists of over 365 interventions to date, including such varied works as RH No. 348 (2017), a 10 feet black marble snowman in London’s Regent Park; RH No. 320 (Snow Monsters) (2015), a constellation of twelve marble snowmen in various stages of melting that occupied the plaza outside of the Flatiron Building in New York City; RH No. 297(2014) a giant granite boulder installed on a concrete pillar in the Swiss Alps; RH No. 200 (2002), an artificial doughnut-shaped island built at the delta of a river in Switzerland with excavated material from the construction of a nearby tunnel. Recent solo exhibitions include One Sun – One Moon, Dominique Lévy, New York (2015), RH No. 324, Art : Concept, Paris (2015); RH No. 315: Sleeping Stone, Karma, Amagansett, New York (2014); RH No. 313: Ages of Smoke, Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2014).

Backslash is delighted to present SOMETIMES YOU LIVE TWICE, Clemens Wolf’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show features a selection of monumental pieces from the ”Parachute objects” series, made from old and dilapidated parachutes using an Arte Povera-style approach. The plastic-coated fabric, one of the Austrian artist’s favourite materials, is ideal for playing with shapes and colours, turning the work into an astonishing landscape of folds and tucks that draw and disconcert the eye.

When we examine Clemens Wolf’s obsessive and mysterious work, we realise that the surface of the pieces in this series, with its powerfully vivid palette, reveals a world that is almost organic. While the artist sees the fabric’s contractions as a stylised representation of decomposition and decay, the resin he uses to hold the folds in place gives the works a distinctive glossy aspect and an intensity that is brought out by the delicacy of the coiled up parachute cords. The choice of such a lightweight and aerial object as the parachute conjures up the fundamental notion of gravity.

With this series of “Parachute Objects”, Clemens Wolf places great importance on the frontier between painting, sculpture and drawing, proposing a deep-reaching reflection on the meaning of the creative act and the status of the artwork. The artist produces an uncompromising multiplicity of versions in a series haunted by his own history (he is a passionate parachutist). His artistic approach is rooted in the quest for perfection and the absolute that rejects all forms of figurative or narrative projection. Similar to abstract expressionism, this series of works brings to mind the compulsive explorations of John Chamberlain and Jackson Pollock. The idea, endlessly multiplied, conveys the artist’s acute sense of material and colour.

Clemens Wolf’s work has been awarded several prizes in Austria and exhibited in many countries, including Germany, Switzerland, China, Israel and the USA. His works are featured in numerous public collections in Austria, including the prestigious Essl Museum in Vienna.

En même temps qu’il réfléchit les dynamiques de la production rationalisée et des conditions de travail appliquées depuis l’ère préindustrielle jusqu’à nos jours, ce projet porte la critique d’une autre économie: celle, hyper-valorisée dans le milieu éducatif, de l’expression personnelle et de la créativité; ainsi le formule Wiegard : « While the project is making use of these margins of existing legislations, it means to open up discursive perspectives on the increasing commercialization and commodification of all areas of life. Nowadays, childhood and predominantly the years of schooling constitute a particularly disciplined and labour-intense phase of one’s life. Whilst in most cases it is financed by one’s parents, it is also characterized by the competitive pursuit of attention and cultural capital. »

Laurent Perbos’ work, in the pure tradition of the art of assemblage, questions how the ordinary things, once revisited, can be seen as a narrative rather than an image. A world where things were formally and philosophically metamorphosed creating mental and visual ambivalent work. The Babylone exhibition is built as an initiatic tale. Through the artist’s contemporary reading, the birds, the chrome-plated trusses from which hang flowery perpends, evoke the legendary city and the magnificient of its terraced gardens.

Gold is a cliché in itself. It smells of imitation marble and cheap penthouse dreams. Like yacht safaris and glittering express elevators. It wants to be powerful, to draw with fountain pens, to pay with cards, to drip from golden taps and to clean up with golden toilet brushes.

Gold is dug out of the deep, dirty earth, shipped half way round the world and stored in deep cellars in dark, steel safes. Gold has skeletons in the closet.

Gold is boring, insistent and simply shines.

Only silence is golden. But we shouldn't be silent!

So what are you doing if you don't have any gold and you don't want to have any, but you would like to make something shine?

Compose colours side by side and on top of each other to make them shine and glow and glimmer.

Yellow-red, reddish orange, reddish brown next to green and violet, a dark blue that is shimmering from the background and will be woven like silk for kimonos, dense, like pixels flowing in light layers of varnish, like a breath of air in the morning, foggy, in the sky, completely nebulous and whispering from far away as a delicate promise.

Intangible transparency of small selective coincidences, a fuming, rousing oracle of Delphi.

Colour that is howling like a golden wave from the seventies. A glamour of freedom shouting over the Atlantic. Crying for California Dreaming, the Golden Gate, for Woodstock and Janis Joplin, for lighthouses of freedom and Odyssey in Space.

The Galerie Bernard Bouche is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works of José Pedro Croft starting from September 16.

In the sculptures of the Portuguese artist, he produces a precarious sense of balance between the stable and the unstable, which, according to the artist, “reflects the impermanent middle of the universe”.
Through the simple materials such as plaster, wood, glass or steel, Croft has an interest in the perception of sculpture and managing with the effects of light, shadow and reflections in order to create new volumes and an distorted sense of space. Thus, through its opposition, a dialectical tension between full and empty appears.

José Pedro Croft, born in 1957, is well represented in significant collections in Brazil, Portugal and Spain. In 2017, on the occasion of the Biennale de Venise, José Pedro Croft has represented le Portugal à la Villa Henriot (Giudecca) with an exhibition titled “Medida Incerta”.

The exhibition The Smell of the Moon brings together works by two young artists, LISE STOUFFLET (F. b, 1989, lives and works in Paris) and ROMAIN VICARI (B – I. b, 1990, lives and works in Paris). She is presenting a collection of new paintings, and he, new sculptures, the close connection between both sets of works being explained by the fact that the two artists are a couple.

LISE STOUFFLET has already established a very distinctive style through her choice of colours (pink, blue…), her fluid and falsely detached touch, her set of themes (childhood, animality, sexuality), the seemingly calm atmospheres she creates, her enigmatic universe, which gives off a diffuse feeling of fear and threat. Although the themes she explores in her work are subtly perceptible, she treats them metaphorically. Her universe calls upon memories and intimacy, but her intention is not to talk about herself. She lets viewers give their own interpretation of her works; they are free to call upon their emotions, their memories, and sometimes even their anxieties. Informed by psychoanalysis, the unconscious and the theme of dreaming, LISE STOUFFLET explores the recesses of the collective unconscious.

LISE STOUFFLET creates scenes, environments, in which figures are caught in an intelligible story but without a connecting thread. The artist intentionally leaves a window open for various perceptions of the same simple scene and allows herself not to explain everything so as to lose viewers, allowing them to add the missing pieces to the work. In Big Birdhouse, Balançoire and Quatre Mains, the characters are in action rather than waiting for action, as though the action had been suspended. As if in between a light colour and a very light colour, the plot which emerges from these works leads us to a new mental space and questions the idea of projection and looking. An almost ironic connection is established between the characters, which has to do with ritual and playing. They share strange, often symbolic moments: the entry into a house, a glance, some form of entertainment.

ROMAIN VICARI’s installations combine luminous, colourful spaces with a personal universe, which emphasizes his Brazilian origins. His artworks are inspired by his almost daily observation of public spaces, particularly abandoned building sites and other such sites; the artist regards these places as ephemeral laboratories. A close proximity ties these works to the urban context, the dynamics of the metamorphosis of cities, and their empirical apprehension by ROMAIN VICARI. Architecture, materials such as plaster, concrete, and steel, colours and shapes which he comes across on the various sites constitute an infinite source of inspiration for him. Like a compromise with – and contradiction of – the principle of the white cube, his site-specific works adapt to the place which the artist seeks to parasitize, and to confront through experimentation.

ROMAIN VICARI records an idea inspired by the site and then materializes it to leave a trace there. His resin installations, which play with light, are witness to contemporary anomalies, like a mutation towards four-dimensional painting. This painterly aspect produces an ambivalence between delicacy (in the colours and shapes) and crudity (of the metal and resin). Thanks to his investigations, the artist appropriates objects which he exploits through an organic nature inhabited by plants, overflowing with lightness, colourful matter, and elegant torsions, incorporating itself to the steel bars which structure his shamanic installations.

All of ROMAIN VICARI’s works question the importance of the space we occupy, a fragile space which is increasingly deprived of resources. What will remain of it? Considering himself an “Indian from the future” exploiting a “sensory geometry”, the artist shakes up conceptual constructions, and favours an empirical relationship to objects, history and training. “Thus grappling with a perpetual process of transmutation, these works combine and intermingle until they generate new, singular matter. In their capacity to capture shapes, gestures and colours, they are the agents of a selective retention project, and, in turn, become conglomerates which may be reused, redirected, like the terms of a syntax permanently being reassembled. What lies in the material invisibility which ROMAIN VICARI erects for us? We will venture to say that it carries a whole poetics of the self in the world and of the world in the self, going beyond exacerbated rationalisms, and advocating animist subjectivity as an alternative to the disasters predicted for us.” (Franck BALLAND)

Gabriel Orozco’s sixth solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel will present new works produced
between Mexico City and Bali.

Paintings, graphite on canvas, and sculptures carved in Balinese limestone will resonate with the Fleurs
Fantômes paintings produced on the occasion of his residency at Domaine de Chaumont sur Loire in 2014
responding to the architecture of its castle.

Gabriel Orozco draws his inspiration from the many places he has visited and lived in and puts forth a
body of works translating a graphic turning point in his practice – highlighting the regions he inhabits
and which inhabit him. Constantly on the move, the artist establishes a dialogue between here and otherworldliness, geometry and fluidity, memory and transcendence.

A text by Briony Fer will accompany the exhibition and will be available soon.

Emblematic place of art brut, the house of the artists of the psychiatric hospital Gugging, near Vienna in Austria, revealed since its creation in 1981 by doctor Narvratil, some of the most important brut artists, among which August Walla whom we exhibited in 2015. We are less aware that David Bowie - who collected their works - found there the inspiration of his album Outside. For all these reasons, we are very proud to have gathered some of the most historic - even museum works - together with some of the most contemporary ones - of 9 of these artists : Laila Bachtiar, Johann Fischer, Helmut Hladisch, Johann Korec, Heinrich Reisenbauer, Günther Schützenhofer, Leopold Strobl, Oswald Tschirtner and August Walla.

(...)
Hélène Delprat is double, Actaeon-Diana, one who paints to assure us that painting still stands back from the noise, for having learned to lose itself. To lose.
One cannot say « no » without belonging to the world of the traveller Thomas Hutter, the young clerck in Nosferatu: « And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him. » But crossing the threshold can mean something more simple than any science of vampires, for all these stories of shadows, of cinema, of stairs, of hands, of love and skulls, call only for one salutatory formula : « Leave here everything you know, become unversed. And travel ! » There is no point looking for a source here: it is in what you do, and that is why Delprat never talks about her painting but only about all the stories that led her there and make the origin unstable. Being impertinent and extricating oneself from the danger of knowledge — this, surely, is the elegance of not saying, of letting people live and look. And, to end as she does with a big burst of laughter, where she still and always hides, here is a kick up the backside à
la Benjamin Péret in Derrière les fagots : (...) and the empty tin of sardines saw itself sainted / A heel hard in the face / and it’s a divinity / swimming in pure honey / ignoring the protozoa / the seahorses / the celestial pebbles that leap from one eye to another
(...)

Excerpt from « The universe is the ash of a dead god », written by Corinne Rondeau for the catalogue of Hélène Delprat’s solo show at La maison rouge « I Did It My Way », from June 23rd to September 17th 2017.
« Et ainsi de suite », in : Derrière les fagots, José Corti, Paris, 1961, p. 108.

Paint is not innocent. The invention of the tube helped artists to find new impressions by working before landscapes. The invention of the spraycan, which puts paint under pressure, made it possible to paint directly onto the landscape, and to find new sensations; painting was confronted with the real, with grit, with architecture, with the streets, its blind alleys and forgotten corners. The painter’s actions and gestures became charged with the tension of the one-shot and the murmurs of the night.

Many painters see painting as a form of combat sports. A face-off with the medium, a confrontation with the materials, the colour (or lack thereof), the line. A combat, too, with the big shots of the past whose unrivalled masterpieces have laid paint out cold, though none should hesitate to roughhouse and disfigure their works. Paint comes in gradients, floats, is sometimes vaporous and Japanese-like with Stéphane Calais , an artist who sees the world as a vast drawing and who is used to pushing the boundaries. With Antwan Horfee, someone who has long put his painting and his ego above the rules, it is underground, explosive and working-class, full of air and authenticity. It illuminates with a fluorescent radiance the garbage, fruit and animals (cigarettes, toilet paper, watermelons, vicious sharks or Pink Flamingo) diluted and arranged with deceptive slapdash by Katherine Bernhardt. It is steeped in panache and virtuoso in Eddie Martinez’s post-graffiti deterioration of the CoBrA heritage. With Renée Lévi, paint is the ghost of a hand ruled by the one-shot of the spraycan, unedited.

Together, these artists of different generations attest to the fact that, since the masterpieces of the Machiavellian Caravage to the black paintings of Kerry James Marshall, via the Etruscans’ sexual ones and the cholo graffiti that marks the Chicano territories and identities of Los Angeles, via the monikers whose words haunt freight trains and tell of hobo lives, or even Saeio’s impertinent hieroglyphics from ‘lo2la’ (the beyond), paint is a vagabond medium, in Jacob Holdt’s sense of the word, a photographer who captured in 1970 his vision of an America that lay between gangsters, drugs, whores and Klu Klux Clan: “a hitchhiker travels from A to B, whereas a vagabond moves in a third dimension—you roll with the punches.” In 2017, painters are not yet ready to be caged lions.

Peter Robinson's new work is perhaps best described through negative definitions. It is anti-monumental, does not subscribe to high production values or heroic gestures and resists being easily interpreted. Subtlety, modesty and lightness of touch and are qualities that are put forward instead. A kind of proto-language is suggested one in which the both the letterforms and syntax still seem to be within the process of formation. The installation feels rigorous and intentional but in the same breath highly subjective placing it in a strange space between reason and intuition. Although adhering to gallery conditions the work is casually presented indexing Robinson's method of making his work in situ. This has the effect of blurring the boundaries between production and presentation, the studio and gallery essentially softening the authority of the white cube.

For his fourth exhibition in the gallery, Michel Aubry (1959, Fr) deploys a series of new productions between sculptures and furniture, sound installation and costume, drawing and ornamental carpets.
Meticulous artist, hunter of know-how in quest for perfection, Michel Aubry has been carrying out for over twenty years a programmatic work, above all centered around manufacturing processes.

Fascinated by the launeddas, a family of Sardinian musical instruments made from reeds, the artist is interested very early in their sonority and their music of oral tradition. His “Conversion Table” (1992), where a length of reed corresponds to a precise sound, allows him to create analogies between sounds and forms, between the invisible and the visible. She invested almost all of her work, from constructivist clothes and furniture put to music to the installations of three-dimensional “partitions”.Michel Aubry questions the boundaries between art and craftsmanship. His interest in manufacturing and know-how, launeddas but also constructivist furniture, led him to study every detail in order to “reinterpret” and “give new life” to the object. Difficult then not to bring his practice closer to that of a sculptor. In addition to sculpting sounds, Michel Aubry thinks and shapes wood, wax, metal and even fabric to express and bring out the score that animates them.

“This phenomenon can be compared to a ‘transfer’ from the artist to the spectator in the form of an aesthetic osmosis that takes place through inert matter: color, piano, marble, etc.”
Marcel Duchamp, Le Processus créatif[1]

Gray filters on the windows. A dark gray, unrolling its film-color in a Cinerama, and whose amber becomes deep green inside the Florence Loewy gallery. It is the magic of gray, which however is not neutral…
Nevertheless, how can we not think about it? Neutral gray, which enables the calibration of colors in photography, the uniform division of ink in printing – that gray the perception of which varies according to what is nearby. The gray of tuning, chords.
The gray becoming that “suspension of conflicting data from the discourse,” to quote the argument of Roland Barthes’ celebrated course on the neutral at the Collège de France.[2] Better still: the gray becoming that “inflection that eludes or thwarts the oppositional paradigmatic structure of meaning.”
The strange fir gray plunges the exhibition space into a half-light favorable to the projection of the film Searching for an A – a story of tuning, instrument and temperance, to be exact. Installed in the main salon of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie in Poissy, a baroque string quartet[3] plays a piece composed, by means of slide show with sound, by the artist Joan Ayrton herself. A piece that music-lovers know well and that, on the cusp of each concert, generates that twinge full of promises. Tuning. Sounds, then notes. And other sounds. A melody that will not be written – whose onlookers (listeners) will not hear any crevices. The four musicians tune, indefinitely; indefinitely, their instruments, whose strings are in catgut, are out of tune. The familiar twinge, both joyous and worried, is prolonged, it too, indefinitely. The promises remained suspended through the long black screens, tracking shots rolling out Le Corbusier’s architecture, shots on the absorbed faces, hands that are searching for the A.
A choreography with introductory gestures and rare images is gradually written. It speaks of the uncertain quest for an understanding; the many attempts, to patiently correct the natural aberrations – acoustic in this case. But not solely. All our aberrations. To attempt to maintain a few well-tempered instruments in the social relationship (among others). Moreover, Joan Ayrton recounts that this film was born in 2013, during a study trip that led her, among other places, to Tijuana, sadly famous for its maquiladoras.[4] She met Mago there, a union activist, in a closed and deserted shopping center; there, thousands of kilometers from her home, the artist suddenly heard “those few notes recognizable among all others, the fifths of a violin that is tuned to the diapason.” It was the shock, specific to any telescoping of realities that we believed were far from us: “They are two voices that that day bore the idea of universality, that of Mago through his history and his fight against social justice, that of the mysterious musician, bent over her violin, searching for the A.”[5]
To get in tune, a standard must be established: a frequency for the A (whose story in the text previously cited Joan Ayrton recalls,), a standard for architecture (Le Corbusier’s Modulor being only one example among others). Everything is a question of measure, of moderation, once again. That of profoundly human efforts, presented here; nothing of hubris – of labor and humility. That of their décor: a house thought of for use but that the site’s visitors know has suffered from the passage of time, as well as many creations of the illustrious Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris. In which the universalist utopia would almost appear as an obsolete functionalism…
However, paradoxically, there no longer seems to be any measure, moderation in Searching for an A. There is nothing but circularity. The camera literally goes around the owner, in sync with this architectural score the ribbon of whose windows stretches 360°: infinities carried in a loop, like the film itself. Universalism no longer sufficing, the cosmogonic takes over. Something escapes, in fact. Would it be the “Pythagorean comma,” that natural and mathematical aberration that Joan Ayrton defines as “a little too much void, a small surplus of space (infra-mince) that the musician must divide in a relatively equal way between the notes of the scale”[6]? The extreme dilation of durations and the incessant resumption of the exercise snatches the eyes (and the ears) from its condition. A plunge is taken into this infra-mince that the artist points to: a massive zoom into this remainder of space-time that, in so doing, becomes in its turn infinitely vast and swarming with all the durations that the eye alone does not perceive.
Because the magnifying glass through which Joan Ayrton examines matter does not only reveal its physical composition, it makes the slowest and most imperceptible changes in state visible. The inert shakes itself, becomes animated – it flows, cuts across, changes direction, occasionally coils upon itself. We witness, with the impression of being present at a live performance, a geological event. I hear gentle cracking, dripping, then streaming. Thus of Flow, produced for the exhibition. This printing on paper is part of the continuity of the artist’s search; she redeploys through black and white photography small (very small: mostly 9 x 12 cm) glycerophtalic lacquer paintings on metal. Painting-matrixes that contain the universe in a reduced form, supports for the most poetic and unlikely daydreams, in the style of Roger Caillois. “The possible implying the becoming – the shift from one to the other occurs in the infra-mince.”[7] And here we are. The shift: that of color that cuts a path in a fluid motion that evokes the ancestral techniques of mottling on paper, whether it is Italian, Icelandic or Japanese.: On this image, more than usual in Joan Ayrton’s work, we perceive a deposit skimming the surface, water that contains something – but what? Pigment, ore? I keep hearing it, this inert, immemorial something that murmurs: “color, piano, marble, etc.”[8]
“It can happen that this is a sound piece with images,” Joan Ayrton confided to me, during a visit to the studio, concerning the film Searching for an A. And I can’t help thinking that the musical – or at least the sound – thing impregnates all her works. Something of the “rhythm uncreated in the universe.”[9] Flow returns the material to its “attracters,” those geometric figures modeling chaos: in which the internal upheavals are gradually organized, in a wrong-way movement, somewhere, of the harmonic tension trying to repair natural and mathematical aberrations.
Slow Melody Time Old, a small edition also produced for the exhibition (and that gives it its title) comes from the same silent music that the spaces between make sound – between states, the strata of scales, beings. I realize that it is also printed in black and white; I am amazed, but I remember that I often correct (inevitably, I should admit) the colorimetry of Joan Ayrton’s works, when I think about it, after the fact: the black and white works turn into colors in my recollections, and vice versa. Would I repair the aberrations? Or would it happen that we never really know, as when we awaken from dreams, in what chroma they were played. Neutral grays taking on the hue of what is nearby, surely. Or being veiled, as Flow, with a verdigris film – a corrosion of the image that is not really one, obviously.
Slow Melody Time Old came out of the melancholic daydream – a timeless ballad, through a few shots taken in the archeology museum in Athens. The glance, of course. Which lingers, both vague and precise. Like attention, in reality. We grasp it, elsewhere, already, hanging on the tree-lined surroundings of an antiquated exoticism, then, lingering on a step, a junction between different soil qualities, earth, stone, movements whose mineral fluidity – although frozen – evoke Flow. It lingers on architectural details, and on the marble bases that, photographed in this way, once again become, potentially, papers found during another of the artist’s trips, small paintings in glycerophtalic lacquer on metal, other mottling, other places, other periods. These bases seem to be steles, although the images only retain their contemplation, and the fragility of the bodies, present everywhere, astonishingly, in this edition as in the projected film.
The glance envelops the sculptures with their timeless postures – in a disturbing, moving fashion: a young girl shivering, a garment like bikini bottoms. It frames the wall notes, the objects exhibited in the windows. Figurines in the form of violins. Searching for an A resonates around me, in the Florence Loewy gallery, but perhaps in Athens still. It resonates with many references to art history, and in particular to modern art in which violins and company were a recurring motif (the instrument and the musicians being present in the entire iconography for centuries and centuries). Without forgetting the hand – another persistent iconographic theme, and not the least, notably in Western painting. The hand that plays, that gives: that gives objects as much as it gives form(s). What are the couple on the bas-relief standing out from the black ground exchanging? A glance, bread, attention?
It is a kind of song of gestures. A music of gestures and too many, or too few spaces. Movements that repair the aberrations and create new ones. From the labor of humans, the labor of rocks, sediment and flows.
It is a kind of song of gestures in which minor and major history are recounted. Not that of our lives crisscrossed into the course of things, not exclusively; that of matter “On a grand scale: on a small scale,”[10] comparing the scale of the body to geological periods, that of this Athenian earth on which was built the museum where objects found there are exhibited, at the very spot. Vertigo, confronted by the loop, the cycles.
A story of measure, of moderation and of immoderation. Beating immoderation.

Andy Warhol said he wished he could be a machine but I'm not about all that, not exactly. I use a Machine, several in fact - sometimes a Leica, Canon, Contax, or Hasselblad - to take pictures with. Why? It's hard to explain, it’s easier to just look and to find patterns, repetition is key. These days everyone has a camera in their pocket and in the Warhol sense they have become machines, empty recorders continually taking aim at the time, trying to capture the elusive and the mundane. The trouble is that time slips away and fades anyway. I make books, zines, and films as a way to extend the life of the photograph, to make it move.

For my show at galerie frank elbaz I am considering the filmic quality of still photographs, making fast photocopies and slower color pigment prints, with the intention of papering the walls with thousands of images. I have been selecting photos from my extensive archive, guided mostly by intuition, this allows me to regroup old and new and to see the patterns within my work. I have been taking wayward paths across time, in predominantly recent work with diversions. The range of places I’ve been and the people I have encountered are what guide me, those people include edge dwellers, skaters, rap gods, athletes, kids, trees, graffiti, faces, tangles, and cars.

Noise, exertion and rebellion and chaos have always been my métier and so for the first time I’m building an ambitious machine of my own, an 8-channel video contraption to show a randomized array of my rarely seen short films. The collection of works in view represents a broad range of images of the past and the present. The Machine adds the element of time and the cacophony of place to portraiture.

The Park is a 58-minute silent movie with one cut that fixes its gaze on an open basketball court in Brooklyn. I’m captivated by the everyday life of the park, the players challenging each other, the play of light and shadow in the physical but also the emotional sense. Situated across from the Walt Whitman housing projects, the basketball court becomes a site of freedom and expressivity. Its the only court I know of in New York that has no fence around it, so the court’s activity blends seamlessly with life around it. The New York Housing Authority has effectively cut off its denizens from the main street, and so, The Park is a microcosm of street life unbound.

Antoni Muntadas (b. 1942 Barcelona) has been the subject of over 200 one person exhibitions throughout North and South America, Europe, Russia, and most recently South Korea, Japan and next year in China. Deeply concerned about the individual’s relationship in the social sphere, the term “media landscape” is frequently attributed to Muntadas, and his legacy as a major video artist since 1971 has been well documented with his catalogue archived by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York, with MACBA in Barcelona, and with his recent retrospective organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. He has been exhibiting in the gallery since 1987.

PROJECTS/PROPOSALS includes heliographs from the 1970s that where remastered into archival screenprints. These 18 works entitled Projects/Proposals (1971-1980) mapped Muntadas’ intentions for installations, videos and performance works. Since these early years, Muntadas has continued to develop an extended series of installations investigating means of context and interpretation.

Two recent projects will highlight the interpetative quality of meaning through language WORDS, WORDS (Palabras, Palabras), 2016, address the redefinition of public space through politics and the media. As presented here, are presented as worn down, denigrated or disappearing altogether due to the use and abuse of power and mass media.

The film project entitled Dérive Veneziane that was presented at the 72nd Venice Festival of Cinéma in 2015, reflecting on his 10 year association with the Universita di Venezia Institute.
Cities are sometimes represented by strong stereotypes or clichés. Dérive Veneziane tries to show another side of the city, the hidden, the unknown, the mysterious.
Through a journey based on the Situationists’ derive, by night and from a boat…
Removing all predictable daytime paths, the wandering mise-en-scène gives rise to a new awareness.
Venice by night is stimulating, along the lines of what Honoré de Balzac described as flânerie or “the gastronomy of the eye”

Drifting through Venice on water by night.
Encountering the unanticipated and unexpected.
A series of resultant tableaux precipitating a
new awareness of this urban environment
as it is transformed by darkness. Removing all
of the predictable paths of daytime, there
becomes a new awareness through this
wandering mise-en-scene.
Exploring the “psychogeography” first defined
By Guy Debord, this journey will seek to modulate
Reality creating an undertow of disorientation
And keen awareness of terroir.
Venice at night stimulates as Honore de Balzac described
It, flanerie or “gastronomy of the eye”.
AM